As we strive to make classrooms helpful for all our students, we often hear advice about adapting instruction for our introverts and extraverts. Odds are good you’ve gotten suggestions like these:
- “Because introverts need to muster up energy in social situations, we should give them time to think before they participate in class discussion. If possible, allow them to participate by writing, or by working independently.”
- “Because extraverts thrive with social interaction, they should participate in group discussions, group activities, and verbal exchanges.”
You might even hear suggestions that go beyond the classroom’s social dynamics:
- “Introverts prefer humanities, research, and programming; they benefit from muted classroom decoration; they think deeply, but have slower processing speed.”
- “Extraverts prefer business classes, politics, and management; they benefit from highly decorated classrooms; they have higher processing speeds, but think less deeply.”
This kind of advice feels intuitive. We don’t want to make our students needlessly uncomfortable.
Because we hear such guidance regularly — I read a Twitter thread on this topic just last week — we should stop to double check its accuracy. In this post, I want to raise two hesitations about this well-intended practice.
The First Reason to Hesitate
Honestly, I’m struggling to find strong research that supports these teaching conclusions.
Let’s take this study by Flanagan and Addy. These researchers tracked over 250 college Canadian students taking biology classes: “Quantitative Biology” and “The Biology of Fungi.” (Yes, fungi.) These students worked in a “team-based learning model” throughout the entire semester; in fact, most of the class time was devoted to these small-group interactions.
Flanagan and Addy tracked three measurements:
- final course grades
- peer evaluations
- self-reports about peer support, learning, engagement with the material
What did they find? No discernable differences among extraverts, ambiverts, and introverts. The researchers themselves write: “Our group-based, active-learning classrooms did not favor extraverts or disadvantage introverts.” This teaching model — with its substantial focus on conversation and interaction — would seem to contradict much of the advice summarized at the top of this post. But when researchers measured the results, they didn’t find that this approach worked especially badly for introverts or especially well for extraverts.
Flanagan and Addy note that other studies have arrived at similar conclusions. While some researchers find that introverts don’t enjoy group-discussion classes as much as their extraverted peers, they all learn the same amount (on average).
These findings make me skeptical that we should listen closely to strong claims about teaching introverts.
The Second Reason to Hesitate
Personality psychologists do research introversion and extraversion. They do use the words “introvert” and “extravert.” However, experts in this field don’t see these groups as clear and obviously distinct categories. In some circumstances, people might experience introversion; in other circumstances, they might experience extraversion. But neither of those experiences mean that anyone is one kind of person.
In the world of popular psychology, people gloss over this problem by creating the category “ambiverts.” But the ambivert category is very large — practically everyone experiences both sets of feelings.
Yes, scholars do include Introversion/Extraversion in the list of the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, intro/extraversion. But the tests that measure these traits do NOT give people labels or put them in discrete categories. Instead, they measure each of those traits along a continuum.
For instance, I might have a generally sunny disposition. But I certainly have grouchy days. I’m not, psychologically speaking, “Mr. Bucket of Sunshine.” And I’m not in a different category of human being than Oscar the Grouch. (Okay, he’s a muppet, but you get my point.)
Let me try another analogy. We see light along a spectrum of wavelengths: from red, orange, yellow, and green to blue, indigo, and violet. We don’t act as if everything around us is either red or violet; we don’t claim that the middle-wavelength colors — from orange to green to indigo — are just compromises of the two extremes. LIke colors, personality traits exist on a continuum — not as two extremes.
To state this argument most bluntly: we shouldn’t take advice about teaching introverts and extraverts because that advice assumes people exist in these measurably distinct categories. We don’t.
1 + 2 = 3
These two concerns reinforce each other.
I wrote a few paragraphs ago, as my first hesitation, that I’m “struggling to find strong research support for these claims.” My second hesitation — we don’t have specific, discrete categories of intro/extraversion — makes that first one even more complicated. If we can’t categorize individuals as one personality type or another, we can’t reliably determine which group responds well to which kind of teaching — because those “groups” don’t actually exist.
For example, I asked Elicit.com if introverts and extraverts benefit from different teaching styles. It considered the twenty-five studies it judged most relevant, and concluded that — yes — these groups learn better in different environments.
However — and this is a big “however” — almost all of those studies asked students to self identify as introverts or extraverts (or didn’t explain how they labeled participants). The only study that used a validated assessment to put students into groups found…no differences between introverts and extraverts.
Because these studies include technical terms (“introvert/extravert”), follow typical research procedures, and include complex mathematical calculations, they seem to carry the gravitas of science behind them. Alas, this self-report methodology obscures the underlying personality continuum; after all, these studies invite students to place themselves in separate categories that personality psychologists don’t think really exist. Hence my enduring hesitation.
The Takeaway
The headlines sound like this:
- Psychologists don’t describe introverts and extraverts as distinct, stable categories.
- For that reason, we really struggle to research the best teaching approach for people who tend to either extreme.
- The studies that look most persuasive to me don’t offer clear suggestions; they suggest that, by and large, we should teach our students the same way.
If someone gives you advice to teach these students this way and those students another way, don’t hesitate to ask for the research behind their claim.
A final technical detail: the opposite of “introvert” has two correct spellings: “extravert” and “extrovert.” In the post above, I’ve consistently written “extravert” — but the Flanagan and Addy study uses “extrovert.” I changed their spelling when I quoted them above so that the variation wouldn’t distract readers along the way.
Flanagan, K. M., & Addy, H. (2019). Introverts are not disadvantaged in group-based active learning classrooms. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 45(1), 33-41.
